Lodi School Forest Tree Planting

The Board President extended an invitation for me to attend a tree planting at Lodi School Forest to celebrate Earth Day. She couldn’t make it and I, surprisingly, had no other local  obligations for the occasion so I gladly accepted the invitation. 

I even had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with our local State Senator, Sarah Keyeski, who was there planting trees with us. I actually took this photograph of her :) She was a nice lady, a hard worker and seemed very genuinely interested in broader conservation efforts.

There were so many kids too! I think I understood correctly that every class in the school district, from Kindergarten through 12th grade, were coming out to plant trees that week. I only worked with a few groups of middle schoolers on the day I helped. They all seemed to enjoy getting outside. 

It was a great tree planting, well-organized by the school district and the DNR. This was actually the second School Forest I’d visited; the first belonging to Reedsburg, adjacent to the Van Zelst property, where a previous workday took place in February. There’s a little write up about that too at the beginning of this document.

I came away from these couple events quite envious of the other school’s forests though. What Baraboo had in the way of a community forest — the Boo-U campus woods — is currently threatened with the prospect of development. I had also just found out that there isn’t even an environmental club at our high school. 

One could argue that conservation is so ingrained in our community that it doesn’t materialize in extracurricular activities but that argument would simply be wrong :) 

Instead, I think we (Baraboo) are uniquely positioned to incorporate conservation ethics more fully into — and throughout — other areas of our community because we are so much in the middle of it. 

We need more trees and we need a school forest to put ‘em in.